March 11 - Does the Bible talk about Transgenderism?

You’re listening to OKY. The place where we discuss what we believe and why we believe it to be true! We have been discussing all things sex and sexuality. And today I want to address the question, does the Bible talk about transgender people? 

 

Let me start by acknowledging that there are people who struggle with gender dysphoria and are trying to understand why they feel the way they do. I want to start by saying I love and respect you. I hate that you feel such discomfort and frustration. I don’t have to understand what you are feeling to love you and want you to find wholeness. I don’t bring up this topic to make you feel less than or that you don’t matter. I bring it up to help people understand what the Bible says and doesn’t say. I want to make sure people know the truth behind an ancient writing that helps us understand God through the eyes of the Hebrew people. For me, I believe this to be the best set of understandings about God. For fellow followers of Jesus, we hold the scriptures to be our source of life and pathway to truth. So it is important to understand what is written and why. 

 

Please know, I will do anything to help you find wholeness and life. And if you don’t agree with my understood pathway to that wholeness, I will love you without imposing my understanding on you. But I will still try to clarify the Bible so that there is no confusion on what it says. 

 

If you didn’t know this, This Wednesday the 12th is national detransition awareness day. This is a day set aside by people who have started the transition process, and either have stopped in the middle of it, or have regretted the process and tried to reverse whatever they could. The problem with it, is that most of the time there are pieces of the process that are irreversible. So this day is to help people stop and really process their options and outcomes - before jumping into a decision to transition. 

 

There is a lot of work done on rapid onset gender dysphoria. Dr. Linda Seiler wrote a book called TRANS-Formation. In it she talks about her journey as a young lady wanting to be a boy. She gives a lot of data and research on how this phenomenon is so rapidly spreading and what we are to think of it. I won’t be addressing much of this in today’s podcast, but I encourage you to give her a listen and see what she says after writing her doctoral dissertation on rapid onset gender dysphoria and what it means for our children.  

 

But today, I want to approach this by starting the conversation from a Hebrew understanding - This is important because this is the language and culture the Old Testament is written in, and is the culture and people the New Testament is written from. So it is important to think like a Hebrew when reading into scriptures that aren’t quite clear to us. It’s dangerous when someone takes a scripture and interprets it to mean what a modern western culture might understand it to be without stopping and asking the question, “does that align with the people of the Bible who wrote and understood this?”

 

 

 

So let’s start today’s conversation with one concept that was essential to the Hebrew people. It’s the word - ‘eḥāḏ - meaning - ONE. This is a word that the Jews say daily when they quote the Shema. You might not have hear the word Shema before, but I bet you’ve heard the first line of it, if not the entire thing. It is found in Deuteronomy 6:4 and says,

 

Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one.

 

This, being an understanding of the character and parts of God, admits that though they are many, they are one. That word one - eḥāḏ

 

It is with the thought of this eḥāḏ that they understood Genesis 2:7

 

Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

 

Being - nep̄eš - meaning soul, self, life, creature, person, appetite, mind, living being, desire, emotion, passion - all in ONE. 

 

It is an understanding that the ruah - breath of God - was breathed into this dust of the ground and caused the physical body and the breath within it to become one. Which by the way is the same understanding that takes place once Adam and Eve are married and become one flesh. There is unity in the concept of the person and the union between husband and wife. The Hebrew intrinsically understood the concept that a person isn’t in conflict with themselves. They are to be united body mind and spirit. The goal is alignment as God is aligned. 

 

See, the presupposition for the Hebrew narrative is that a God harmoniously functioning as three in one, gave mankind the same treatment to harmoniously function in many parts as one. I mean listen to the next part of the Shema - Let me start it over with the beginning in Deuteronomy 6:4

 

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the LORD is one. Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. 

 

If you take the time to understand the Hebrew/Jewish culture, you begin to understand that the goal was oneness within self in order to align with the unified oneness of the living God. 

 

The thought that someone wouldn’t align within their inner self, needing some sort of transition to change them, is such a contradictory thought, that it would never have been part of their teaching. They knew that the unified God, created the human being in his image. This was a call for the human psyche and the human body to be in such alignment that there was no duality of existence. 

 

So when you hear people say that the Bible supports transgenderism, they are off base. Hear what I am saying though. Not because the Jews were transphobic. But because in their assessment there was no such thing as transgender. God only created a person to be whole as one - they were aligned in their thought as they were in the body. This is because they were made in the image of the unified single God who function in three persons. 

 

And before someone says that they must have then tried to align their body with their mind, their belief is that a person is born with the ability to be aligned. So if the body is physically made by God, the breath of God in the person aligns the inside with the physical creation God made on the outside. 

 

So to claim a verse is meant to be interpreted as trans affirming, is wrong simply by principle. The Bible doesn’t do much work on gender ideology for two main reasons. First, it is a more recent ideology. While in the past several hundred years we are able to point to various examples of people rejecting binary gender roles, the best we can do is interpret ancient writings to imply something we are addressing in modern times. There are no deep indications that there was an ancient dilemma of one finding their gender identity. 

 

Second, the Jewish understanding didn’t leave room for people to rebel against part of their makeup. They were supposed to find alignment with the body and spirit as God assigned it. They didn’t leave room for anything other than harmony inside of a person. This is affirmed in Paul’s writing in the New Testament as well as throughout the Bible. The thought is that we are to take captive our thoughts, align our hearts desires, and transform the mind so that it aligns with the physical role God placed us in. 

 

Do not conform any longer to the patterns of the world, but be transformed by - changing the way you think. Romand 12:2 (NLT)

 

And to read the Bible from the perspective of someone who didn’t write it, would mean you are missing something that was implied and presupposed. This is the danger with using Biblical texts to try and prove a modern ideology. It might not implicitly say something. But the text has to be contextualized for setting, audience, and author. All three of those. . . well. . . must eḥāḏ - be viewed as one, while reading the text. 

 

Tomorrow we will address specific text that are often used to prove a point in this conversation.